Despite increased pressure on the crypto sector, he believes it’s going to be a year of progress for business, adoption and smart contracts.

With the new year now thoroughly welcomed in, businessman Fred Wilson believes the crypto market will bottom in 2019, entering a “new bullish phase,” according to a recent statement.

The early Twitter and Tumblr investor welcomed in the new year on his blog, before laying out his predictions for 2019. They’re not quite the chipper aphorisms smattering the New Years’ cards, but crypto will nevertheless experience several promising developments this new year, according to him.

First up, Wilson predicts that the US will receive a new president by the end of 2019, and that the S&P 500 would likely hit 2,000, where he expects it to stay for most of the year. He also said that it could take most of 2019 to find the bottom on crypto-tokens.

“I expect we will see some bullish runs, followed by selling pressures taking us back to retest the lows. I think this bottoming out process will end sometime in 2019 and we will slowly enter a new bullish phase in crypto.”

How will this ‘bullish phase’ come about? Wilson believes 2019 will be the year in which many promises made in 2017 are fulfilled, specifically the launch of “big name projects,” (such as Protocol Labs’ Filecoin project), and ‘next-gen’ smart contract platforms that will “challenge Ethereum for leadership in this super important area of the crypto sector.”

He continued that he also expects Ethereum’s open source community to “ship a number of important improvements to its system in 2019 and defend their leadership in the smart contract space,” and expects to see “meaningful progress” for stablecoins, cryptoassets and gaming, and earn-spend opportunities overseas.

The crypto sector will see its fair share of pressure, though, particularly from regulators and fraudulent schemes.

“The area I am most concerned about are actions brought by misguided regulators who will take aim at high quality projects and harm them. And we will continue to see all sorts of failures, from scams, hacks, failed projects, and losing investments be a drag on the sector.” he wrote. Even so, he remains “incredibly optimistic” about 2019,

“That is always the case with a new emerging technology that allows anyone to set up shop and get going.” he continued. “Permissionless innovation produces the greatest gains over time but also comes with the inevitable bad actors and actions.”

For Wilson, it’ll be a case of taking crypto with a pinch of salt over this next year. Whether from progress or pressure, he’s convinced “it is going to be a doozy.”